16 rnYSICAL CEOGRArHT OF THE SEA, AND ITS METEOROLOGY. 



iu office, water, Avlietlicr fresh or salt, solid, fluid, 

 marvellous in its powers. 



42. It caters on land fm' insects of the sea. — It is one of the chief 

 agents in the manifold workshops in which and by which the 

 earth has been made a habitation fit for man. Circulating in 

 veins below the surface, it pervades the solid crust of the earth 

 in the fulfilment of its offices ; passing under the mountains it 

 runs among the hills and down through the valley's in search of 

 pabulum for the moving creatures that have life in the sea. In 

 rivers and in rain it gathers up by ceaseless lixiviation food for 

 the creatures that wait upon it. It carries oif from the land 

 whatever of solid matter the sea in its economy requires. 



43. Leaching. — The waters which dash against the shore, which 

 the running streams pour into the flood, or with which the tides 

 and currents scour the bottom of their channel ways, have 

 soaked from the soil, or leached out of the disintegrated materials 

 which strew the beach or line the shores, portions of every solu- 

 ble ingredient known in nature. Thus impregnated, the laugh- 

 ing, dancing waters come down from the mountains, turning 

 wheels, driving machinery, and serving the manifold purposes of 

 man. At last they find their wa}^ into the sea, and so make the 

 lye of the earth brine for the ocean. 



44. Solid ingredients. — Iron, lime, silver, sulphur, and copper, 

 s-ilex, soda, magnesia, potash, chlorine, iodine, bromine, ammonia, 

 are all found in sea- water ; some of them in quantities too minute 

 for the nicest appliances of the best chemists to detect, but 

 which, nevertheless, are elaborated therefrom by physical pro- 

 cesses the most exquisite. 



45. Quantity of silver in the sea. — By examining in Valparaiso 

 the copper that had been a great while on the bottom of a ship, 

 the presence of silver, which it obtained from the sea, was 

 d-ctected in it. It was in such quantities as to form the basis 

 of a calculation, by which it would appear that there is held in 

 solution by the sea a quantity of silver sufficient to weigh no less 

 than two hundred million tons, could it all, by any process, be 

 precipitated and collected into a separate mass. 



46. Its inhabitants — their offices. — The salts of the sea, as its 

 solid ingredients may be called, can neither be precipitated on the 

 bottom, nor taken up by the vapours, nor returned again by the 

 rains to the land ; and, but for the presence in the sea of certain 

 agents to which has been assigned the task of collecting these 



